Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation

Description

A vivid look at China’s shifting place in the global political economy of technology production How did China’s mass manufacturing and “copycat” production become transformed, in the global tech imagination, from something holding the nation back to one of its key assets? Prototype Nation offers a rich transnational analysis of how the promise of democratized innovation and entrepreneurial life has shaped China’s governance and global image. With historical precision and ethnographic detail, Silvia Lindtner reveals how a growing distrust in Western models of progress and development, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis of 2007–8, shaped the rise of the global maker movement and the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation. Lindtner’s investigations draw on more than a decade of research in experimental work spaces—makerspaces, coworking spaces, innovation hubs, hackathons, and startup weekends—in China, the United States, Africa, Europe, Taiwan, and Singapore, as well as in key sites of technology investment and industrial production—tech incubators, corporate offices, and factories. She examines how the ideals of the maker movement, to intervene in social and economic structures, served the technopolitical project of prototyping a “new” optimistic, assertive, and global China. In doing so, Lindtner demonstrates that entrepreneurial living influences governance, education, policy, investment, and urban redesign in ways that normalize the persistence of sexism, racism, colonialism, and labor exploitation. Prototype Nation shows that by attending to the bodies and sites that nurture entrepreneurial life, technology can be extricated from the seemingly endless cycle of promise and violence. Cover image: Courtesy of Cao Fei, Vitamin Creative Space and Sprüth Magers

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation

  • 2020-09-15
  • 288 pages
  • Ebook
  • Princeton University Press

Similar books

• 

  Family History Digital Libraries

  By William Sims Bainbridge

  One named Sara and Timberlake had 11 male workers, 1 female worker, and 4 children workers, so it might have employed the Minor family.

• 

  Foundation Dreamweaver MX

  By Craig Grannell, Jerome Turner, Matt Stephens

  So here's what we need to do to arrive at our layout: s Create the main table to hold all the page elements. s Deal with the navigation area which is ...

• 

  Cisco CCNA Certification, 2 Volume Set: Exam 200-301

  By Todd Lammle

  This inclusive, two-book set provides what you need to know to succeed on the new CCNA exam. The set includes Understanding Cisco Networking Technologies: Volume 1 and the CCNA Certification Study Guide: Volume 2.

• 

  CompTIA Network+ Study Guide: Exam N10-006

  By Todd Lammle

  ... you can use: –a –A –c –n –r –R –S –s All nbtstat switches are case sensitive. Generally speaking, lowercase switches deal with NetBIOS names of hosts, ...

• 

  CompTIA Network+ Study Guide with Online Labs: N10-007 Exam

  By Todd Lammle, Jon Buhagiar

  ... you can use: –a –A –c –n –r –R –S –s All nbtstat switches are case sensitive. Generally speaking, lowercase switches deal with NetBIOS names of hosts, ...

• 

  CCNA: Cisco Certified Network Associate FastPass

  By Todd Lammle

  S The S reference point defines the point between the customer router and an ... with the letter E deal with using ISDN on the existing telephone network.

• 

  Stranger in the Chat Room

  By Todd Hafer, Jedd Hafer

  A sequel to In the Chat Room With God finds a group of teens contacted by a mysterious and increasingly malevolent character who claims to know about their encounters with the Almighty and challenges their beliefs. Original.

• 

  Error Correction Coding: Mathematical Methods and Algorithms

  By Todd K. Moon

  M M−1∑ k=0 −∞ ∞ k=0 The average energy per signal E s ∫ can be related to the ... we will deal primarily with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), ...

• 

  Security+ Training Guide

  By Todd King

  ... to deal with most , but unfortunately not all , of these potential threats . ... The S / MIME standard implements encryption for message content using ...

• 

  CCDA: Cisco Certified Design Associate Study Guide: Exam 640-861

  By Todd Lammle, Andy Barkl

  S reference point The S reference point defines the reference point between ... with the letter E deal with using ISDN on the existing telephone network.